Just How Damaging Is Hentai?

A response to "The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention."

Last Saturday night, I published "The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention." If you haven't read it, I recommend it—albeit with caution, as it deals with some very heavy themes. The piece is about an immigrant woman's marriage to, and eventual divorce from, an orientalist pedophile. 

The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention

Hell of a description, I know.

When the author, A., first contacted me, I was hesitant. I was worried about potential backlash: a vitriolic comments section and possible harassment.

My second fear was that this could be an elaborate hoax.

That I was the one who would be opening myself up to ridicule. Because of the nature of this blog, I field plenty of trolling attempts. Zoomers (you know who you are) pitching pay-for-play Discord servers promising access to taboo subcultures, fabricated accounts of dark subcultures, catfishing schemes ostensibly designed to get me to blow up my own life, lolcow-style. 

As far as I know, I haven't fallen for any, but there's a first time for everything.

To assuage my anxiety—both the anxiety that I might be hurting this woman instead of helping her and that this might be a fiction designed to discredit me—I did my best to verify the story's truthfulness. I met with A. I saw her face. I'll never know with 100% certainty, but my interactions with A. that day, and since publishing, made me feel like she wasn't lying.

She was telling me the truth. She needed help. She also was looking for catharsis.

I understand why some readers might question the story’s authenticity. If I can't convince you of it, I'll say this: the writing is interesting on its own. Even if it is fiction, that doesn't mean there's no value in it—as a piece of literature and as a discussion piece.

For me, A.'s story is a story about emotional isolation as much as it is about porn. Her isolation and her ex-husband’s.

The "story beneath the story" is how we process our emotions, and in particular, our terror.

Many of the themes discussed in this piece were familiar to readers. For some of you, too familiar, and that set off alarm bells. While some people felt like the style's coolness indicated A. never cared about her ex, to me, I got the sense that she couldn't feel the weight of how horrible what was happening truly was.

She was removed because she could only be removed. 

To fully appreciate what was happening—to be anything but analytical—was too much. She shut down. She was paralyzed.

To borrow some language from therapy, she didn't have the tools to process it. 

This isn't an abdication of responsibility, a way to innovate on "why she's a victim," as some have suggested. 

Instead, this is an explanation of a common experience, one that we're too quick to dismiss. Speaking of “therapy language,” in my opinion, this is one of its core utilities. Emotions are messy, scary, and worst of all, isolating. Sometimes things are so frightening, the only thing we can do is treat them with remove.

Eccentric or disturbing pornographic tastes and even pedophilia may be "familiar tropes" in the world of online storytelling, but in physical reality, they are jarring. They are disturbing. You don't encounter them out in the open every day. Even I don't, and I spend at least ten hours a week interviewing people about some of the darkest parts of their online journeys. The first time I read this story—the first time I read it with the deep sense it was true—I cried.

It should go without saying that this is particularly true of pedophilia. 

This is a woman's real-life experience, not a story or a think piece, but something she was facing in the physical world. Imagine if you discovered a loved one was a pedophile, or at least had pedophilic inclinations. Truly imagine it. Imagine how sick you would feel. How much would it damage your ability to trust others. 

Now imagine that you're alone in a new country. You may have a support system in the way of friends, but certainly not your family. Your gut tells you that you will almost certainly destroy the life of the man you once loved, not to mention your own. And all the while, you're not sure what he's doing is illegal or even a risk to others, even if it's personally disturbing. 

As with rape, it's easy to say, "Go to the police immediately." But you don't know how you'll react until it happens.

This isn't an apology for not intervening earlier.

I agree that the "correct" thing to do would have been to seek legal intervention as soon as there was even a suggestion he may be a danger to others. But braveness is a virtue precisely because it's difficult. In fiction, we have the power to make our characters do the right thing as soon as they can. In the real world, we make mistakes. There is ambiguity when faced with dangerous situations, even if hindsight is 20/20.

I don't think A. is a bad or evil person. I think A. was in a situation so terrifying that many of us can't appreciate just how terrifying it is—even I can’t, as much as I’ve tried.

It is a morally complicated story, but it's both a challenge to not compromise on our values and be compassionate. We can disagree with or even condemn her actions while appreciating the immense difficulty of her experience.

There's also the larger question of the way the Internet impacts our sexuality. 

After spending the better part of this year speaking to fictosexuals, I have strengthened my opinion that the Internet is the physicalization of our imaginations (Ruby Justice Thelot recently published a post about paracosms and AI here). 

Not only is it a place, but it is a place where we can fully retreat into our own minds.

I think I said it best in a post about fan fiction that dealt with themes of incest:

“When I first started writing fan fiction and text-based roleplaying, I was extremely disturbed by the ubiquity of incest as a theme. Here were 10, 11, 12, and often 13-year-olds at the oldest, shipping brothers and sisters, brothers and brothers, mothers and daughters. Up until this point, to me, incest was confined to particularly unnerving Oprah or Law & Order: SVU episodes. It wasn’t something I wanted in my fan fiction. Even as a pre-teen immersed in the same subculture and environments, I couldn’t understand how my peers hadn’t immediately marked this off as off-limits. And I never really understood it. (Sirius/Remus…that I grokked immediately. But slash fic is another story.)

Decades later, I’d start seeing headlines reporting that incest is one of the most popular genres of porn. Sometimes, people would even ask me what I made of that. I didn’t have a good answer. It’s taboo, I guess? It’s like the emotional equivalent of anal sex? I don’t know. But tonight, it dawned on me: incest ships were probably appealing in fandom because they represent a level of intimacy that to a lonely pre-teen or teen is at once unfathomable and extremely desirable.

Even though, in reality, it’s abuse, in the shipper’s mind’s eye, it is a distillation of closeness that only a terminally lonely person could long for. These ships are appealing for the same reason yaoi and slash are often appealing. It’s symbolic of the closeness only a person who’s never experienced intimacy could want.

I’ve long believed that before you experience in-person, physical-world sex, your imagination runs wild. You don’t have fetishes before you’ve had physical-world sex; it’s unfettered horniness that expresses itself in all sorts of confusing ways that you mistake as a fetish. Your sexuality becomes warped under the weight of your own curiosity about the nature of desire. Things you wouldn’t be interested if you knew yourself or your sexuality start looking appealing because all you have is the sandbox of your imagination. And fetishes don’t have the same weight in your imagination as in the real world. (This is also why I believe that sometimes role-play IS just role-play, even if that doesn’t always hold up in every situation.)

So, back to fandom and incest: What if the growing popularity of incest is not only about novelty and taboo-seeking, as is often suggested? What if it’s a proxy for a longing for emotional intimacy and intensity, filtered through limp plot lines and suggestive porn video titles? And furthermore, what if it reveals a sort of naivete about one’s real-world sexual tastes? Really, a society-wide lack of sexual experience?”

What I didn't say in that piece is that over a long enough period of time, I think it becomes so ingrained in your sexuality that it is your sexuality.

It is no longer about "what it represents." You become incapable of "growing out of it." That is where danger — true danger — begins. Where you start to see the seeds of addiction.

This is the point at which there is no exit: the machine has eaten your soul.
You belong to the Internet, now. Not the physical world.

As I put it in a comment:

"I believe part of it is becoming so disconnected from your physical body that your soul becomes trapped in cyberspace."

I also wanted to allow the author to respond to any unanswered questions. She chose not to answer many of them because much of the situation is still new and painful. I understand that may not be satisfying, but I hope the little information I provide can help clarify the situation.

Here is what she sent me. Please keep in mind English is not her first language, so what native English speakers may understand as “coldness” is a language barrier:

We bonded over shared obsessions over sports activities. I married him because at that time he was helpful, friendly and attractive.

I think the physical activities, friends and families kept his addiction at bay, all the way into the marriage. These healthy external factors gradually fell apart due to geographic restrictions.

He decended into self isolation.

[...]

We met through a sports activity group.

At first it was a blast. We had good times.

Any vocabularies involving this guy and love fills me with disgust right now. But if you asked me back then [if I loved him], yes absolutely.

[...] 

Restrictions include moving away from friends and families due to work. And unfavorable climate.

[...]

We met through playing sports and group activities. We travelled a lot together, and were socializing and outside all the time at the beginning of the marriage. I wanted a house, two dogs, two kids with him. American dream basically. 

[...]

 I have trouble trusting men who are into anime. I don't know if it's completely rational.

She loved him. And she thought she knew him until one day she didn’t. 

If you take anything away from this blog—the whole thing, not just this post—I hope it’s the power of our imaginations for better and worse. And just how easy it is for multiple lives to exist in one body.

The Internet just makes that easier.